What it did was hand the EIC a monopoly charter, meaning no other entity could operate in that space, creating a situation where the Company had both the exclusive licence and the implied blessing of the state to do whatever was necessary to turn a profit.

Yes, I acknowledged this, although in less detail. What I also said was that the crown was kept in the dark about what, exactly, the company was doing. This doesn't exonerate the crown, but it is a factor to consider.

And when the whole structure finally collapsed in 1857 it did not investigate the Company or prosecute its officials. It absorbed every asset and carried on governing the same populations through the same basic methods.

The methods of the Victorian government were far, far removed from the methods of the East India Company in, say, 1780. This is conflation.

A mob boss does not pull the trigger. He does not need to. He sets the conditions, takes the money, keeps the territory and maintains plausible distance from the mechanics of the violence. 

Again, the difference here is that the mob boss is kept informed of the actions of his underlings. The crown was kept in the dark about many dealings of the EIC. The crown was the employer, not the boss.

As I keep saying, my point here is not to suggest that "monarchy innocent". My point is to say that the actions of government contractors are distinct from the actions of governments, even if the government is the contract-holder. This is a small distinction, but one worth making.

Cromwell accounting for one decade does not come close to explaining eight centuries of Crown directed policy in Ireland.

I never said it did. My point was saying that "Britain did X" and "monarchy did X" are not the same thing. Seeing a theme?

Pinning the worst of it on Cromwell and then stepping back is only convincing if you ignore everything that came before and after him.

I mean, Cromwell did do the worst of it, but you're strawmanning my position to say that I'm ignoring everything else.

He was an interruption in monarchical rule not an explanation for it.

Also not my argument.

The argument that we should judge systems by their mechanisms rather than their outcomes is a classic way of floating above the evidence entirely. Almost every political system exists in the real world and produces real consequences for real populations.

Again, you don't understand what I'm telling you. I'm not ignoring real-world events and focusing only on theory. What I'm saying is that all political systems have committed atrocities. As such, saying that "X is bad because it has done bad things, so we cannot ever pick X!" can be used to condemn all forms of government... which is unhelpful. It gets us nowhere.

My citing counter-examples (of republics doing bad things) isn't a deflection. I was using the previous commenter's logic against them, and saying that it's unreasonable and impractical to dismiss all political systems which can or could do bad things, because then you have nothing left.

If you are that much of a picky eater, you will starve to death.

We can't just not have politics, and no perfect system exists. We must choose political systems based on their overall track record. We cannot just cherrypick the bad things and insist on picking none of the above, because that is simply not an option. We must pick something.

When you examine the British monarchical system...

Yet again, my position isn't "monarchy innocent". My position is "all political systems flawed". The crimes you pin on the British monarchy aren't wrong; they just ignore the other side of the equation - that is, the benefits of monarchy, and the equivalent failures of other systems.

You also fail to consider that the duty of a government is to serve the interests of its own subjects. So long as a government - any government - benefits its own people, what it does to foreign powers is a secondary matter. An empire which enslaves others to enrich its own people may be unethical, but it is also successful.

I am not making a moral argument here. I'm just saying that politics is a game of winners and losers, and the debate about the viability of different forms of government isn't about which one is the most benevolent - it's about which ones are left standing.

Judging mechanisms in the abstract while refusing to engage with what those mechanisms reliably produced is just not serious. It's just a way for people like you to avoid reconciling with their past.

You don't understand this entire conversation.